"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)."Erik Keilholtz

Under the patronage of St. Tammany

Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children.Email

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement--
a fever in the victim--
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.

"You can never tell with either how it will go." That's it!

And the late scholar and former MLB Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti gives an erudite spin on the same:

[Baseball] is autotelic activity...transformative of negotium to otium, tedium to freedom (in Aristotle's terms, war to peace), because it is a medium for self-transformation...A "win" is the actual realization of what is centrally an imaginative surge.

So maybe there is the perfect response to the "baseball is boring" crowd.

Pedro tonight! And who knows how it will go? Our excitement grows by the hour.

* * *

Has anyone else noticed a resemblance between the bearded Kevin Millar and the Three Stooges wrestler Bustoff?

Maybe in addition to "Tessie" and "Dirty Water" they could blare "Pop Goes the Weasel" through the Fenway PA.

* * *

Tufts is pressing a claim to having the played the first modern college football game, against Harvard, in 1875. The accompanying photo of the 1875 Tufts team posed in striped skivvies and muttonchops would have appealed to Edward Gorey.

The Jumbos open their 130th football season at home in Medford against Wesleyan on Saturday, while Harvard opens the Ivy season against Brown at Providence.